Automation rules based on transitions not statuses

[Andrew Marshall]

I have the following scenario within Service Management:

Issues are raised by customers and set to "Reported"

The service desk staff then view the issue and respond in one of two ways, to fulfil our initial SLA. As part of this response the status is changed to "Initial Investigation".

There are 2 transitions from Reported to Initial Investigation, one is a "custom reply" which, upon changing the status from the issue view, brings up a screen which enables them to add a customer facing comment before changing the status, the other is an "auto reply" which triggers an automation rule which comments on the issue with a generic "We are looking into your issue".

The idea behind this is that the service desk staff can chose to either reply with some detail, or to speed things up, use a generic comment instead.

The issue I have is that there doesn't seem to be any way to automate based on transitions, only statuses. As both transitions have the same originating and destination status, I'm struggling to set the automation rule only to trigger for the "auto reply" transition, and not the "custom reply" where the staff member will have added their own comment.

The workaround I have for this currently is an intermediary status for the auto reply as below:

Custom Reply: Reported > Initial Investigation

Auto Reply: Reported > Acknowledged > Initial Investigation

It is the status change to Acknowledged which triggers the comment to be added automatically, and then changes the status to Initial Investigation.

Is there a better way to do this, or any way you can automate based on transitions, rather than statuses?

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

One question that comes to mind here is how would you trigger the automation in a way to give the agent time to manually respond? The answer would be that your automation for the auto-response would have to be one of the following:

• a manual trigger - a rule that can be triggered manually by the agent from the delis sue view OR
• a scheduled rule - say running every 30m and if the issue is still in the Reported status then go ahead and transition and respond with canned response

of the two I would recommend the second solution. Another thing to consider is using an addon for canned responses allowing agents to quickly respond with common responses. You could also use an auto-text app for this.

[Andrew Marshall]

Hi Jack,

Both the "custom reply" and the "auto reply" are options are actioned from a staff member changing the status in the Issue view manually, the auto reply as you say is essentially a glorified canned response which can be triggered by changing the status.

I wanted to avoid setting scheduled rules to avoid the risk that staff are mid-responding as the scheduled rule triggers, meaning the customers gets an auto reply followed by the staff "custom" reply.

I did look into canned responses but everything seems to be Apps rather than native, and as with everything I have to be able to justify costs (which start to add up).

Some articles mentioned a comment post function which could be attached to the "auto reply" transition in the workflow, but I can't actually see add comment in the available post functions.

Are we ruling out the ability to automate based on transitions over statuses as this functionality just isn't available?

[Jack Brickey]

Thanks for the additional context. No you could certainly have two different transitions (manual and auto reply). In that case, to accommodate automation goal, you could have a custom field (auto reply) that is set to true if the auto reply transition is used. Then the automation condition could  check for that and issue the auto reply comment if true.

regarding post function comment this is not there OOTB. 

[Andrew Marshall]

Nice solution, cheers.

I've added a custom field which is set to true only on the "auto reply" transition, and then an automated rule which looks for changes to this field and where it has been set to true, adds the customer facing comment.

Thanks for your help with this!